Illegal Fishing and the End of the World
(posted by marie)
Shark fin soup? Sushi anyone? Maybe a little Whale?
We have all heard that the world’s fish populations are rapidly declining but what does that really mean? Who is over fishing? What are they fishing for? How do they get away with it if it is supposed to be illegal? How severe will the ecological impact be for humans if fish populations continue to decline? Why isn’t there an International Open Water Police keeping these criminals out of shipping vessels and out of the seas? It is obvious that we need nations to sit down and agree to a set of International Open Water Fishing laws but that is only the first step. Once laws are in place, who will stand up and face the ruthless organizations that fish illegally? I don’t think they will give up a multi billion dollar income very easily.
May 10th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
IMO this is a matter of poorly defined property rights. Garrett Hardin is famous for the phrase “tragedy of the commons,” but he later said he should have titled his article “tragedy of the *unmanaged* commons.” Fisheries are a classic example of something that would be suitably organized as a common, owned and managed by those fishing them. Like the traditional village common in England, the fishers could regulate the catch with a view to sustainability. The problem now is they belong to nobody, creating a prisoner’s dilemma in which everyone has a rational incentive to strip them for all they’re worth before everyone else does. That’s essentially what Hardin meant by his unfortunate phrase: not a rationally managed common property, but something that belongs to no one.
May 11th, 2008 at 1:41 am
I’m glad you used “common” as a singular. Many Americans use “commons” as a singular, as they do “woods”, “savings”, and a few other things. However, where those other uses are just minor grammatical failings, in the Tragedy of the Commons the whole singular/plural thing is crucial.
There were lots of commons, e.g Wimbledon Common is well known in England and Boston Common is well known in the USA (Henry George documents the taking over of a common in New York in his day). Each common had its own commoners - note the word “own” there - and other people, even commoners from elsewhere, had no rights in it. These rights varied, but commoners were restricted by custom in what they could do. These customs were enforced; the introductory part of Buchan’s life of Cromwell has some material on a collateral ancestor of Cromwell’s who was summonsed for abusing his commoner’s rights in Putney in early Tudor times (which got onto an official record). Sometimes, outsiders like drovers could pay “Thistle Rents” on some commons, for the right to graze their droves there while passing through. Sometimes, land was only common in certain seasons, but used individually for crops in other seasons, e.g. “Lammas Lands” (named “Lammas” after the trigger date marking the change). These rights were property rights, but I once had trouble getting that into wikipedia from a US-centric critic who inisted that it wasn’t really property because you had to be able to trade property for it to qualify as property at all - despite vast European precedent for inalienable property, like entailed estates.
If you use “commons” for this common or that, it blurs with all the other commons, and it gets harder to keep your eye on the ball by blurring “each” and “all” - and the difference between the interests of “each” and “all” just happens to be what drives the mechanism of the Tragedy of the Commons in the first place, so it matters a lot.
May 11th, 2008 at 10:08 am
What I see here is a competition between those who are ‘legally’ exploiting the resource and those that are not. Merely reinforcing the criminality (and hence ‘evil’) of the act of fishing without permission. Some vague attempts are made to draw parallels between ‘legal’ action and ‘ethical’ action (overfishing, quotas, H&S) but I’m sure that most people reading this are aware that the two are not synonyms.
The difficulty I have is that, typically, the regulation is given over to a third party who does not derive their livelihood from the fishing itself, but from its management and policing. Hence they have less interest in maintaining a long term ecological balance than they do in maintaining their own jobs. Or, at best, maintaining the image of an ecological balance for the duration of their role in the regulation. The kind of motivational factor that leads to a proliferation of spin to cover an unhealthy status quo.
To draw from the original post:
“Once laws are in place, who will stand up and face the ruthless organizations that fish *legally*? I don’t think they will give up a multi billion dollar income very easily.”
—
Another problem to consider this is that if we increase regulation of fishing then the cost of legal fish is likely to increase (probably through taxation). Whilst the risk factor of illegal action may well also rise, it’s likely that the resulting profit will increase too, as the cost of production is unlikely to change (Except the addition of another couple of bribes and forged certificates to sidestep the new layers of bureaucracy. Marginal in a multi-billion euro market.)
Any system of certification would have to be, if you’ll excuse the pun, watertight to discourage illegal imports.
The video itself says that the cause is short term profit. Extra policing and certification seem unlikely to deal with this, any more than they already do with other goods (e.g. recreational drugs, including alcohol and tobacco)
It may help that consumer costs would be likely to rise, discouraging people from buying fish at the rate they do now, but this would have painful repercussions for both the illegal and legal traders. In fact it may boost the trade in illegal imports as, due to lower costs (not having to deal with all the legislative barriers to entry) they may be able to undercut those complying with the law.
As to a workable solution… well, you could allow an amnesty on other ‘crimes’ if people are complying with quotas that prevent overfishing (and certify all produce that complies). You could subsidise from other sectors *shudder* to push the profit in illegal trading down. Or you could just sit back and watch people unwittingly eat their way though the planet’s biodiversity and face the consequences later. Ultimately, surely, you need to have less people buying and eating fish? I don’t see how you can effectively deal with that by branding some fish legitimate and some illegitimate.
The idea of penalties for flag states by effective embargo is interesting, though again I can see this damaging legitimised trade more so than illegitimate. Does this mechanism have any successful precedent?
May 12th, 2008 at 1:35 am
I was about to use the other spelling, PML, on the assumption that it was the one most Americans were familiar with, but I feared your wrath.
Incidentally, Gene Callahan had a similar idea: turn a fishery into a non-profit corporation and distribute shares among those currently fishing there in proportion to their catch. The main thing is for the state NOT to auction it off to some corporation, which will then charge a fee to those fishing there.
http://www.gene-callahan.org/blog/2007/11/establishing-property-rights-in-commons.html